As popular and successful as Samsung may be, the company has taken the spotlight over the last couple of years for ripping-off a lot of companies in their products, the most notorious being Apple. We've seen various lawsuits flying around between these two companies, precisely because of how the Galaxy line-up follows on the iPhone's footsteps, and yet, it seems that Samsung hasn't had enough. SamMobile has just leaked a screenshot of how S Voice will look on the future Samsung UI, and you guessed it, just like S Voice looked like Siri in its inception, this new update looks like the new ...

On the last 2012 episode of the Pocketnow Weekly podcast, recorded immediately following the Christmas holiday, we spent a little time trading tales of gadgets wished-for and gadgets received from generous gift-givers. More importantly, we also swapped stories of an observational nature. The holidays are more than an opportunity to re-learn how to share a table with distant relatives; if you're lucky, they're also an occasion to observe how normal people interact with technology - often new technology. We talked about that more on today's episode of the Weekly -heavens, we do chat our ...

It happened so long ago, the memories come to me in vague shadows. It was an unremarkable weeknight in 2002. I was watching TV in my college dorm room, probably waiting for the then-new Star Trek: Enterprise to return from a commercial break. A 30-second spot for Nokia flashed onto the screen, the last frame dwelling on the image of a mobile phone amid a field of futuristic blue plasma. The model number escapes me, as does the sub-brand, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that closing product image, which made the phone look, on my 13-inch CRT TV screen, like it had no buttons. As ...

Like it or not, voice control on mobile devices is back, and this time it may be here to stay. That's a more complex introduction than it seems. I want to dissect it a little, piece by piece, and I want to do it out of order, just to keep you on your toes. The first prerequisite we need to cover is that voice control on mobile devices came about in the first place: for something to be "back," it needs to have first existed. For decades, talking to a piece of technology that was intelligent enough to understand you was the stuff of science fiction. 2001: A Space Odyssey's ...

There's no denying that the definition of what a smartphone is has shifted quite a few times in less than a decade. At first it was a phone with PIM functionality, later a PDA that had phone functionality, later a phone that was smart enough to handle anything developers could throw at it, and as of a few months ago, it's all about a phone that talks to you. I know many of you started reading this thinking that Voice Control is the big thing now, but as we've been going through the different alternatives in the market lately, it's clear that the technology is not there yet. Our first ...

I'm running the beta version of iOS 6 on my 2012-edition iPad here in the office, which counts support for Siri among its many improvements. Our own Jaime Rivera has already whipped up a full preview of iOS 6, but I thought I'd take a ground-level look at just one of its features- specifically, how Siri feels on a tablet. We’ll take her for a spin, and then we’re gonna do a little “talk-off” between Siri and S-Voice on the Galaxy S III. The reason for our re-tour of Apple's voice-control app? Well, it's clear that Cupertino considers Siri more than a hobby; you don't hire Samuel L. ...

No one seems to be able to talk about S Voice, the voice-control application shipping with the new Samsung Galaxy S III, without referencing Siri. The Apple-based equivalent launched first, of course, serving as one of the few features justifying the existence of the iPhone 4S, so comparisons are perhaps inevitable. Though voice command had existed before, Apple pulled its usual stunt of "doing it better" -and certainly marketing it better- with Siri, and voice command on mobile phones found itself thrust into the spotlight again. This level of advertising spending on vocal command hasn't ...

When the S Voice application, which launched together with the Samsung Galaxy S III, leaked and was made available for the masses -- at least those running ICS-powered Android devices -- many have jumped to download, install and take the application for a spin just to later find out that there were some network errors which led everyone to believe Samsung was blocking the service. While there was a fairly easy workaround, Samsung itself admitted that they are indeed blocking the offering. According to the manufacturer, they are indeed blocking S Voice and it is because "Samsung Electronics ...